University of Louisville president James Ramsey's chief lieutenant, Provost Shirley Willinganz, tells the Chronicle of Higher Education that U of L refuses to take down an exhibit that includes explicit photographs of young girls because the First Amendment protects their right, you know, to exploit children and all:
Because the project features photographs of nude women and girls, the university is facing pressure to call off or adjust the exhibit, as the University of North Carolina at Wilmington did last year, when it removed the images of girls as a condition of allowing the program to proceed. But Louisville has declined to demand changes and is standing behind the exhibit, saying that its message has been distorted by critics and that principles of free speech and academic freedom are at stake.
Shirley Willihnganz, provost at Louisville, said in an interview that she has been approached by people in the local community and by state legislators angry about the exhibit. And she said that while she is happy to explain the context of the exhibit, she is not willing to cancel it or to order its modification ...
First, The Basketball Coach That James Ramsey Won't Fire had his way with Karen Sypher. Then he had his way with James Ramsey. Now he wants to have his way with the media.
The Basketball Coach That James Ramsey Won't Fire is not only not contrite: he's giving lectures to the media on how to behave. He doesn't like the fact that the media is reporting on the prosecution of Karen Sypher. This is the same media that held the taped phone message for weeks until it publicly came out that The Basketball Coach Who James Ramsey Won't Fire had had an illicit relationship with Sypher.
You'd think he'd be appreciative.
One of the things he claimed to upset about was that his story was being broadcast on the day that everyone should have been honoring Ted Kennedy on his death. Wait a minute. Why is The Basketball Coach That James Ramsey Won't Fire mad at the media for this? Why shouldn't the rest of us be mad at him for it? Here are a whole bunch of people who would probably much rather be hearing about Kennedy's life, and instead they're having to endure watching Karen Sypher wax incomprehensible. Again.
He's the one who brought all this on himself. And guess what? If he had done the honorable thing and quit, we wouldn't all be plagued with it all right now.
He charged that television stations who played the tapes of Sypher speaking with the FBI were broadcasting "lies." This is the man whose attorney is claiming he paid Sypher $3,000 for "health insurance." Sypher should have remained quiet: Pitino appears to be the only philanderer who provides his bimbos with benefits.
The Basketball Coach That James Ramsey Won't Fire really seems to think he is too good for all this. And why not, with enablers like Ramsey giving him the impression that he's got carte blanche to do whatever he wants without actually being held accountable in any real way to his university?
His impromptu press conference seems to have caught everyone off guard, and it can't have come as good news over at the Scandal War Room over at U of L, which must now have to operate 24/7, and where Ramsey has probably now added staff who specialize in bimbo eruptions.
Now Rick is all over the news again, and the chief subject of talk show discussions.
Could it be that Ramsey is now thinking that maybe he should have cut Rick loose after all?
It was discovered this week that University of Kentucky coach John Calipari was one of a small class of college basketball coaches who have been to two final fours and had both of them vacated by the NCAA for rules violations. This class of coaches to which Calipari now belongs is so small that he has literally no one else with whom to compare notes.
Calipari, despite the fact that he hasn't actually won a single game for UK yet, is viewed by not a few people (including, apparently the university administration) as the newest coaching Messiah. Every time a coach is hired at one of our two major universities, there might as well be large crowds of people lining both sides of Versailles Road laying down palm leaves and shouting "Hosannah!" for all the subtlety that exists about expectations.
The only recent exception I can think of is UK Football Coach Rich Brooks, who was born into the world of Kentucky sports of lowly estate, but whose legacy has been secured by having been crucified early on, and only afterwards rising to rock star status by winning games and being a generally good guy. He now faces the prospect of serving out the remainder of his career between the coaching equivalent of two thieves.
Although the UK administration stuck with Brooks, just one more season of mediocre performance would have resulted in his dismissal. Wins and losses now officially count for more than "indiscretions" both on and off the court at the state's institutions of higher sportsmanship.
In fact, University of Kentucky President Lee Todd has at least one other person to compare notes with in the the small class of presidents of which he is a member: the class of university presidents who have basketball coaches on staff who have embarrassed their universities. The other one, of course, being University of Louisville President James Ramsey, who has seemingly made a career out of mishandling big scandals.
What the last several weeks has shown is that neither Todd nor Ramsey have a vocabulary that would allow them to even understand the moral dimension of the behavior of their staff--or, for that matter, of their own decisions.
When it came out that Rick Pitino had had an immoral (can we get rid of that morally vacuous term 'inappropriate'?) relationship with a woman and then paid for her abortion, Ramsey came out and called it an "indiscretion." The word 'indiscretion' is a word people use when they simply want to ignore the moral implications of some action. It is another one of those morally sterile words that populate the speech of the Hollow Men who now run our institutions of higher learning.
The word 'indiscretion' means 'imprudent'. More literally, it means "not discreet." And 'discreet' simply means you didn't hide it well enough. To say that someone on your staff committed an "indiscretion" simply means that you don't really care whether they did or didn't do something, but rather that you wish it hadn't been found out because you've got paperwork to do and you don't want to be called by reporters with revelations that might result in your having to answer uncomfortable questions that, being a morally illiterate person, you don't really know how to answer.
Lee Todd, whose moral illiteracy has been proven on more than one occasion (and here I refer to the defense of human cloning at UK and the subsidizing of live-in sexual partners of his staff) hasn't been pushed quite far enough yet to have to invoke the magical word 'indiscretion', and has so far only had to call for a basin of water and a towel to wash his university's hands of any blame in hiring a coach who, it is now revealed, has had multiple egregious violations of NCAA regulations under his watch.
What Lee Todd should have come out and said is: "This is a disturbing revelation. We are concerned about the ethical conduct of our coaches and our teams. This university will take special precautions that this does not happen here. We are concerned about winning, but, being an educational institution, we are more concerned that our students understand the difference between right and wrong and that they not see that distinction confounded by the behavior of the individuals we place in authority over them."
What did he say instead? According to is spokesman Tom Harris, "it's not a University of Kentucky issue." There you go.
I would suggest that these college presidents be required to attend classes at their own universities where they could learn how to engage in something like moral discourse, but I'm not sure they even have such courses. In any case, attempting such a thing might be no more effective than trying to give sight to the blind.
One U of L recruit says he's staying despite Pitino's problems: "Yo I ain't leaving," said Peyton Siva on his Twitter page, "Rick('s) personal life is his life. He's here to coach me and is the best teach of hoop to me! So like the fans say, 'Go Cards.'"
So now we know that U of L's standards are as high as those of a teenage boy. It's a high mark to aspire to. Let's hope President James Ramsey's university is up to the task.
While Jeremy Jarmon was kicked off of the University of Kentucky football team for inadvertently taking the wrong dietary supplements bought from a health food store, Rick Pitino is keeping his coaching at the University of Louisville with any penalty after paying for an abortion to cover up a sexual liason.
Here are a couple of news articles I was quoted in on this story:
In a blog yesterday, Martin Cothran, a lobbyist for the Family Foundation of Kentucky who has in the past advocated against abortion and same-sex marriage, called for the university to fire Pitino.There are “two issues here,” Cothran said in an interview. “One is, are we holding Rick Pitino to a lower moral standard than we do student athletes? ... We suspend people from teams for bar fights. We fire high school coaches for unintentionally causing the deaths of others. What we have in this case is somebody who intentionally acted to end a human life.”
Martin Cothran, a senior policy analyst for the Family Foundation of Kentucky, a conservative think tank, called for Pitino’s firing on his personal blog.
In an interview Wednesday, he said the latest revelations obviously show the hypocrisy factor of a Catholic family man who may have paid for his mistress’s abortion. “Add to that the fact he’s in a position of moral leadership, he’s ‘Coach,’ he’s supposed to be modeling good behavior for students,” Cothran said.
As Page One Kentucky Aptly put it, "It's not going away." If the James Ramsey's scandal-plagued university was really looking for the best thing to do for Rick Pitino (not to mention everyone else), he would have pulled the plug on this weeks ago. As it is, Pitino's whole private life is now going to be dragged out into public view.
A student pro-life group at the University of Louisville is calling for the dismissal of basketball coach Rick Pitino:
“Rick Pitino will always be considered a great basketball coach, but just because he knows basketball does not mean the University of Louisville community should hold up this man as a role model and hero,” Lisa Just, president of Cardinals for Life, said in a news release.
From Christine Brennan, USA Today sports columnist:
After all this, how does Rick Pitino ever again go into a recruit's home, look his mother in the eye and tell her with a straight face he'll watch over her son's education and moral well-being?
How does Pitino ever punish a player for violating a team rule? How does he offer life lessons to his players? How does he walk onto a stage to give one of his patented motivational speeches without being laughed right off of it?
Basically, how does Rick Pitino continue being Rick Pitino, especially when we're not entirely certain just who that person is anymore?
Episode I: Rick consolidates his position as basketball coach by winning lots of games Episode II: Rick is the object of an extortion attempt by a woman Episode III: Rick decides that $10 million is too much to pay for the woman's silence, although this particular woman's silence would be beneficial to everyone, including herself. Episode IV: When Rick reports the extortion attempt to the FBI, it comes out in the press that Rick had met the strange woman (who turns out to be strange in more ways than one) at a local Italian restaurant owned by his close friend Tim "the Facilitator" Coury, and that he had had what the two joking call an "indiscretion" at the restaurant while Rick's driver Vinnie waited in the restaurant. Episode V: University president James "the Bungler" Ramsey meets with his veteran damage control team to discuss what to do. When Ramsey begins explaining how he thinks they should deal with fraud and mismanagement issues at the university, aides quickly remind him that that particular scandal is over and that they are dealing with a new one now. The episode ends with Ramsey getting lost as he tries to find his way home. Episode VI: An intrepid reporter finds the police report in which Rick admits his sexual affair with the strange woman and also that he had paid her $3,000 to have an abortion. Rick's lawyer, Steve "the Handler" Pence, tries to explain that the money was not for an abortion, but for "health insurance" for the strange woman. According to the police report, the line Rick used when introducing himself to her at Porcini was, "Hey baby, how's your health insurance plan?" Pence disclosed that he gave her the $3,000 for her first year's premium, but offered to perform the mammograms himself. Episode VII: A public outcry over the affair and the abortion forces university officials to quickly paper things over with a press conference in which Rick invokes 9/11 to explain his actions, although no one appears to understand what in the world 9/11 has to do with a sexual liason or paying for an abortion. University president Ramsey tells the press that his university is not a degree mill and that the charges are "anonymous crap." Aides briefly take him aside and remind him that the Deasy and Felner scandals have already been put to bed and that they are talking about Pitino now. Ramsey leans into the microphone and says, "Never mind." Episode VIII: University damage control team members high five each other after their press conference snows everyone into thinking that the whole thing is over. The season's final show ends at Porcini, where Rick is introducing himself to another strange woman who looks like she needs health care insurance.
The Louisville Courier-Journal today on the big rug they've got over at the University of Louisville under which they sweep things:
Similarly distressing was the initial reaction of UofL president James Ramsey and athletics director Tom Jurich. The latter said Mr. Pitino had been truthful with the university and that “we stand by him.” Mr. Ramsey said the new details were “surprising,” but also sounded supportive and added Wednesday only that he will meet with Mr. Jurich. That didn't sound like a no-nonsense, get-to-the-bottom-of-this response from officials whose top priority must be the integrity of the university and its sports programs.
The university and a gaggle of lawyers can argue about whether Mr. Pitino violated terms of his contract that stipulate that he can be fired for causing “disparaging media publicity of a material nature that damages the good name and reputation” of the university and for “acts of moral depravity.”
On two matters, however, there can be little argument. One is that Mr. Pitino and the university would be expected to take harsh measures against any player or staff member who had behaved as their coach did.
The locus of responsibility in the Rick Pitino scandal has shifted several times. The first was Pitino's encounter with Karen Sypher, in which both Coach Pitino and Sypher were complicit. Then it shifted again when Sypher tried to extort Pitino, in which Sypher proved what kind of person she was. It shifted again when Pitino went to the police to report the extortion.
What this latter action says about Pitino is hard to determine. His choice was between being extorted and not having his dirty laundry aired out in public, and not being extorted and having people finding out about what he did. He chose the latter. Whether he chose it because it was the cheaper alternative (she was demanding $10 million) or because it was the right thing to do is hard to tell. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt.
The locus of responsibility shifted once again when the police report came out yesterday in which it was revealed that Pitino did indeed have a sexual encounter with Sypher, and that, in addition, when she called and told him she was pregnant, he gave her $3,000 for an abortion. At this point, the responsibility shifted to the University of Louisville, specifically, to the ethically challenged James Ramsey, the university's president.
Sypher certainly didn't acquit herself well when she had it. Pitino failed his first test and passed the second only because we are stipulating that he did. How did Ramsey fare?
This isn't Ramsey's first test.
His first test was during the controversy over domestic partner benefits at his university, in which he lied to a legislative committee about whether U of L was paying for health benefits of its employees live-in partners. He was caught red-handed when it was discovered that U of L had been subsidizing the benefits for several months.
When ruse was made public by Yours Truly, Ramsey had to go back to Frankfort to smooth things over with the legislators he had lied to. Word has it that Ramsey or one of U of L's lobbyists was raked over the coals by at least one legislative leader for his behavior. Ramsey never publicly fessed up, and he continued to dissemble about it for weeks afterward. He even followed up his original lie with lies to his alumni.
And then there was the matter of the U of L Board closing ranks to protect him.
About a year later, Ramsey was faced with another opportunity to do the right thing, from which he backed down once again. After numerous complaints from staff about Education Dean Robert Felner about personal bullying and sexual harrassment, to which Ramsey and Provost Shirley Willinganz repeatedly turned a blind eye, it was revealed that Felner, who one former employee referred to as a "psychopath," was defrauding the University (and the federal government) of tens of thousands of dollars in grant money.
This was a man who "bragged openly at faculty meetings that he had the full support of the Provost and President," according to a letter signed by twenty-one former faculty members.
Here was Ramsey's response:
That's right "anonymous crap." Sheeez. Ramsey finally apologized, but only after making a complete fool of himself and having no choice. Ramsey first understated the severity of the abuse of grant money, then, after five years of verbal abuse by Felner, Ramsey added insult to injury by verbally abusing them himself, calling their complaints "anonymous crap." Not only were they not crap, but, it turns out, they weren't all anonymous. And, of course, there were no consequences for those in administration--Ramsey himself and Willinganz--who mishandled the whole situation.
Then, just three days after the belated apology, it was revealed that John Deasy, a superintendent in California and one of Robert Felner's cronies, received a PhD from the University after completing only 9 units of coursework never completing any residency, opening the university up to charges of being the equivalent of a degree mill. Again, it was swept under the rug and Ramsey looked like a bungling idiot.
Not only has Ramsey demonstrated a decided lack of ability to deal competently with administrative problems and public scandals at the university, he apparently has a tin ear when it comes to the political and public relations issues that these problems have caused.
Now the University has a coach on its hands who has not only committed behavior that is a public embarrassment to the University, but is more morally reprehensible than anything it has ever expelled a student athlete over.
Here's Ramsey's lame statement over the matter:
Rick Pitino is the University of Louisville's basketball coach. He has been a role model for countless young people and a positive influence on this community.
Regardless of the truth or falsehood of specific actions that have been attributed to the coach, he's clearly made errors in judgment that have come under intense public scrutiny. We can't ignore these errors in judgment, and they have saddened and disappointed me. As we try to teach our students, when you make a mistake, you admit it and right it as best you can. Coach has done that today.
It's not an easy thing to come before the university community and all of you to admit mistakes and commit to do better. I know this has been difficult on the coach, it's been difficult on me, and difficult for our university. But as Coach Pitino and I discussed earlier today, this was the right thing for him to do.
We hope this closes this chapter; we're all ready to move on. Our university is recovering from a flood that shut down a large portion of our campus, preparing for the start of classes on August 24th, and getting ready to welcome the most academically talented freshman class in our history. We need to get back to our job of educating the next generation of Kentucky's leaders.
This is utterly absurd bureaucratic cant. "Regardless of the truth or falsehood of particular actions"? What kind of mealy-mouthed talk is that? We know what happened. And "errors in judgment"? Is that what ethically challenged university bureaucrats call paying for the destruction of a human life?
Before we get "back to our job of educating the next generation of Kentucky's leaders" we need to have leaders now that know how to actually engage in leadership. And James Ramsey is not one them.
